Political Behavior, Vol. 24, No. 3, September 2002 ( 2002)
PARTY POLARIZATION AND PARTY
STRUCTURING OF POLICY ATTITUDES:
A Comparison of Three NES Panel Studies
Geoffrey C. Layman and Thomas M. Carsey
The conventional wisdom in the partisan change literature predicts that increasing
party conflict on one issue agenda leads to a decline in party conflict on another
agenda—a process called “conflict displacement.” We have argued that recent party
politics in the United States has experienced “conflict extension,” with the Democratic
and Republican parties in the electorate growing more polarized on cultural, racial,
and social welfare issues, rather than conflict displacement. Here, we suggest that
the failure of the literature to account for conflict extension results from incomplete
assumptions about individual-level partisan change. The partisan change literature
typically considers only issue-based change in party identification, which necessarily
leads to the aggregate prediction of conflict displacement. This ignores the possibility
of party-based change in issue attitudes. If party-based issue conversion does occur,
the aggregate result can be conflict extension rather than conflict displacement. Our
analysis uses data from the three-wave panel studies conducted by the National Elec-
tion Studies in 1956, 1958, and 1960; in 1972, 1974, and 1976; and in 1992, 1994, and
1996 to assess our alternative account of individual-level partisan change. We show
that when Democratic and Republican elites are polarized on an issue, and party iden-
tifiers are aware of those differences, some individuals respond by adjusting their
party ties to conform to their issue positions, but others respond by adjusting their
issue positions to conform to their party identification.
Key words: political parties; party identification; elections; public opinion; voting be-
havior; party realignment.
Geoffrey C. Layman, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt Univer-
sity, Nashville, TN 37235 (geoff.layman@vanderbilt.edu); Thomas M. Carsey, Associate Professor,
Department of Political Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2230 (tcarsey@
garnet.acns.fsu.edu).
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0190-9320/02/0900-0199/0 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation